As news is generated about Ben Rachinger, media cover it. In fact, last court appearance, there were camera crews from TVNZ, Sky News (I believe) and TV3.

That’s all normal and fine.

But what happens when a news organisation starts to champion one specific individual’s case against another? What if they are actively interfering in the court case? What if they fund a media lawyer when their protagonist is self represented? Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Nick Davies will forever be known as the journalist who broke the phone-hacking scandal in the Britain, bringing down the 168-year-old News of the World tabloid.

At a Christchurch WORD event on Tuesday night, he discussed his views on the media and his book, Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch, with The Press editor Joanna Norris.

Starting in 2008 after a tip-off, Davies, who works for The Guardian, began investigating illegal phone-hacking and bribery by journalists employed by News International.

He wrote more than 100 articles over two years on the activities but it was only when he revealed News of the World journalists had listened to and deleted voicemail messages left for murdered teenager Milly Dowler that public outrage forced the police to re-open investigations.

By 2011, it was revealed more than 210 people had been complicit in the illegal activities and victims numbered more than 5000.

Don’t hold your breath that the same will happen in New Zealand when it comes to email hacking. Journalists, decent, trained and skilled, have been directly involved in the Dirty Politics hacking against me and others. Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Yesterday we saw the public representatives of the left-wing stand in parliament and show their unwillingness to help those in suffering. They should hold their heads in shame, but that is for the next post.

What you need to understand is what those public figures represent, in all its appalling clarity. These comments are from various left wing blogs, I read them so you didn’t have to.

Weka at The Standard:

If the choice is between supporting the US and a cafe terrorism once a decade, I think we should take the cafe.

So innocent victims of terrorism is ok with this person because at least we aren’t supporting the US.

Lynn Prentice, the world’s greatest sysop, now also the world’s greatest solver of Middle East conflict:

As it stands, I’m starting to think that it would be an interesting case for an old imperialistic solution. Let their stable neighbours (ie not Syria) partition it along more rational lines and occupy it under a UN protectorate for a decade or so to stabilize the society. Charge the cost and a large profit to the US and UK taxpayers who were stupid enough to cause the problem.

So which stable neighbours of Syria and Iraq are you suggesting Lynn? I can only think of one…Israel, yeah like that is going to happen.

Tiger Mountain at The Standard thinks it is all a plot manufactured by the US:

this has been a textbook example of “manufacturing consent” at the behest of 5 Eyes and Uncle Sam, from snooping law changes, front page/TV news leading with gruesome IS videos, increased passport sanctions, a visiting Iraqi politician, to even the Westfield mall video that has been around for some time apparently, surfacing in msm on the very day cabinet was firming up a position!

The answer is to not participate in or support imperialist wars. To put diplomatic pressure on via the Security Council and trading partners to not support IS in any shape or form. To run a truly independent foreign and trading policy. To lavish aid on the vulnerable including various stripes of Kurds.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Philip Matthews is a Twitter troll, and a journalist. He is a lot like John Drinnan, just with a smaller newspaper to bleat on it.

His constant harping and screeching about Dirty Politics led me to block him, he like many journalists think Twitter is the real world. He still misses the point of Dirty Politics. It was an attempt to silence, in my case permanently, opposing political voices.

Nonetheless he has written an article in the DomPost addressing the elephant in the room…the left wings very own dirty politics brigade (but without the influence or relevance).

The left wing mistook Twitter and blogging for the real world, and failed in their attempts to get me.

But are they part of the problem rather than the solution….after all Martyn Martin Bradbury established The Daily Blog with union funding to be “a Whaleoil killer”…and failed. He never even got close to his stated goal of a million pagewiews a month before the election.

In a parallel universe, David Cunliffe is the prime minister of New Zealand presiding over a Labour-NZ First minority government in a happy arrangement with the Green Party. Internet Mana, backed by German entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, has a few MPs in Parliament, including veteran activist Hone Harawira.

ACT is already history and former Prime Minister John Key has taken a long holiday in Hawaii.

Wake up. The Left was soundly defeated in the 2014 election.

“I think it’s fair to say we haven’t had dreams in colour since September 20,” says Left-wing activist and blogger Martyn Bradbury.

He freely admits he got it horribly wrong. That was his election prediction above. He “didn’t consider for one moment” that voters would rally to National and that high levels of early voting meant that New Zealanders were backing Key.

Instead, Labour had its worst result since 1922, the Greens slipped below their 2011 peak and Harawira is out of Parliament. “Despondent” is a good word to describe how those on the Left feel.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

You may recall our recent story about Pak ‘n Save being drawn into politics by a very insistent but small crowd run by Martyn Bradbury and Lynne Prentice’s blogs. They have intensified their efforts since Pak ‘n Save put the whole thing in the too hard basket.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

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The Standard and other various left wing people out there have been attacking the government and Murray McCully in particular over an alleged “rape Culture” in New Zealand and protecting the rights of victims to speak out about the “crimes” that were visited upon them.

It’s funny you know, because when you do a bit of research around this issue you find all sorts of interesting contradictions.

Take the case of Julian Assange…superficially it is similar to the Malaysian diplomat case. Assange is charged with actual rape, where as the Malaysian diplomat is charged with intent to rape. Assange’s charges are much more severe. Both are being sought for extradition to the country where the alleged crimes occurred. One used diplomatic protection to run, the other just ran and is hiding in another country’s embassy to avoid facing his accusers in court.

Now this is where it gets different. In New Zealand a foreigner appears to have picked up a “rape culture”…where as Julian Assange is portrayed as the victim of a vendetta and trumped up charges.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

On Thursday evening the latest Roy Morgan poll came out. Normally I don’t comment on Roy Morgan polls, for a start they aren’t a member of the Market Research Association of NZ and their poll is all over the place showing massive swings for no apparent reason.

The only reasons that I comment on Roy Morgan polls is because it is the darling of the left-wing commentators who clutch at straws these days and because they tell us that they poll mobile phones, which is yet another bugbear of the left who think the indigent classes are left out from land line polling. There is not evidence at all to suggest this is the case, yet they persist with the urban myth. That, therefore, is why I comment on Roy Morgan…because the very things that the left uses to discount results of other polls that don’t suit their narrative don’t exist in Roy Morgan polls.

So, looking at left-wing commentary since the latest Roy Morgan it has been a struggle to see anything. save for the erudite musings of Chris Trotter, other than int he comments sections of the more popular left-wing blogs or on news sites.

The one thing that is apparent though is the bunker mentality of some.

Normally the left-wing blogs will crow about the Roy Morgan, now there is nothing but silence. Greg Presland even went out of his way to write a post that declared last week a win for David Cunliffe, despite his “cluster truck” policy being panned universally all week, their manufacturing policy launch slipping by un-noticed due to releasing it late on the day before a long extended holiday weekend and continued vocal criticism of their inept and wonky social media campaign that continues to deliver cock-ups and mis-steps. No mention of the poll still despite three days having elapsed…but plenty of time to write a post as to why Chris Trotter and Kiwi in America are wrong, dead wrong, and labour really is on the up and up.

Even Lynn Prentice felt so compelled to fill the void of political commentary that he wrote a lengthy post about how the servers operate The Standard, proving once again that he is the world’s greatest sysop. For a site with so little traffic they seem to have engineered themselves something Telecom would be proud of to run their enterprise.

The bunker mentality has set in, and it is bunker mentality that really takes its toll in politics. People hunker down, they ignore observable facts and details and continue to issue stirring announcements about great victories when the reality is they are pressed on all sides.

Pete it was one poll taken during the royal visit, Labour and the Greens went down and the right track wrong track rating went up by a similar amount to National’s increase. Wait for the next few polls and then have the discussion. Or do you think that we should cancel the election now and just let Key get on with it.

And do you always agree with Chris or just when he backs up your world views?

and;

Presuming it is valid, and RM does bounce around, it seems that the Royal Tour has had the desired effect …

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

Oh dear…Lynn Prentice, the guy with the girls name and the world’s best sysop is showing us the traffic over the Christmas break and explaining why he needs a multi-layered, industrial strength server set up for what is in reality a flea blog with flea traffic.

The primary server has been moved out into the offshore cloud far away from the expensive costs of having to pay for the costs of the Southern Cross cable monopoly. The ~5% of our traffic from human readers offshore wasn’t a problem. However the searchbots (most recently the bloody bingbot) and spambots causing us to exceed our “free” datacap on overseas traffic. This was $3/GB when we started on the old server and is now $1/GB.

However it has cost us thousands of dollars in variable per GB charges since I moved the server back to NZ in 2011. Does nasty things to the site’s operating budget. For instance in November it cost $103 extra because the Bing searchbot tried to read the entire site including every comment link. They nearly did a million page views in November and 600k in December. The really irritating thing is that we get very few incoming searches from Bing. I’ve now constrained Bing to a more limited diet.

Which is all mumbo-jumbo pseudo tech speak that says in reality, that “though I am the world’s greatest sysop I’ve managed to be tucked by smarter people than me into paying thousands extra in traffic charges because I knew best”….

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.